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RAJAR Round Up: 6 out-performs 3 (just), Radio 2 still biggest
By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 31 July 2014
Ah, radio listening figures, that quarterly helping of audience stats from the radio industry’s RAJAR body. Here’s five snippets from the batch…
1. 6 Music is now bigger than Radio 3 (just) in terms of overall number of people listening, the former pulling in 1.89 million and the latter 1.88 million, despite 6 Music only being available on digital networks, while Radio 3 has an FM outlet. 6, of course, has seen its audience surge ever since the Beeb threatened to shut it down. Perhaps they should announce they’re closing flagging R3 to give it an audience boost too.
2. Radio 2 continues to wear the ‘biggest in Britain’ badge, even though its overall number of listeners was down slightly on the last RAJAR quarter to 15.5 million. Though the station’s Chris Evans breakfast show saw its audience rise again, compared to both the last quarter and the last year.
3. Radio 1 also enjoyed a slight increase in audience this quarter, as did its breakfast show fronted by Nick Grimshaw. Grimmy pulls in 5.97 million people aged 15+ a week, 6.39 million if you include kids under fifteen. And why wouldn’t you?
4. In the commercial domain, good news for Capital FM which is the biggest commercial player in London ahead of Magic, Kiss and Heart, in that order, but not so good news for it’s new sister station Capital Xtra, which has a RAJAR of 358,000 listeners daily, nearly half that pulled it by the station it controversially replaced, Choice.
5. Overall listening on the DAB digital network increased again, 7% year-on-year, so that 48.5% of the adult population is now listening to some radio on DAB. Elsewhere radio listening via the web and apps was up, while listening via digital TV was down.
For more juicy radio-based stat joy, take a look at this infographic RAJAR has put together.